


Unprotected

by Viridian5



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Drama, Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-04-25
Updated: 1999-04-25
Packaged: 2017-10-02 09:37:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Viridian5/pseuds/Viridian5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Is it protection or a vote of no confidence?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unprotected

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for "Revelations."
> 
> Re-injuring my neck inspired this story. My original conception ended much differently, but Te convinced me that Scully wouldn't accept his excuse so easily. My Mulder's reaction to that surprised me...
> 
> Read-through by Small Woodinat Creature.

Mulder was cold, but the neck brace wouldn't let him move well enough to pull the thin sheet further up over skin left mostly bare by the hospital gown. Unable to even turn his head to the side, he'd already counted all the holes in the ceiling; it made him wonder why hospitals never put pictures up there. He couldn't even remember how long ago the doctor had abandoned him here. He was alone in the hall on his gurney except for another man on another one five feet away who was noisily coughing up blood.

Then the man looked at him and gurgled, "Hey, everybody, Fox is back! Guess you missed being here, huh?"

Mulder couldn't move to look, but he heard them coming closer: shuffling, rolling, limping... He saw a million kinds of suffering in the people who loomed over him and grabbed him, in the hopeless eyes and bloody, bruised, swollen, and discolored flesh punctured by needles and plastic tubing. One little girl with dark hair and a face that had been half reduced to something that looked like raw hamburger dripped something on his bare arm. They smothered him...

"Mulder!"

Mulder woke up to see a very irritated Scully looking down at him; her face filled his vision. Any inclination to say in relief that it had only been a dream ended as his cold, battered body and surroundings showed him that his sleeping mind had taken some of it from reality. Everything hurt, and the neck brace cut into the swollen flesh of his jaw. The tape holding a bandage to his cheek had started to come loose, and the pulling feeling annoyed him as much as all the pains. He and Scully were completely alone in the ward, with not another patient, doctor, or member of the living dead to be found.

"How long have you been sleeping?" she asked.

Mulder thought back. "The doctor told me he'd get me a shot for the pain and would be back in 15 minutes. I think I remember waiting for 45." He managed to crane his head enough to see the clock. "The doctor was last here about an hour and a half ago."

"How could they just let you sleep? You could have a concussion!"

Good; she'd reserved the rage for the hospital staff. For now. "It's just the usual neglect." He had to ask, "How do I look? Someone was nice enough to mention that all the broken blood vessels make me look like I have freckles over half my face, but I'm wondering what's under the bandage."

"Vanity, Mulder?"

"They taped a bandage the size of my hand to my face. They checked to make sure the puncture hadn't gone all the way through my gums. I think I have a right to be worried."

She peeled the bandage away. "Oh, it's bad." She smirked. "The wound near your jawline has the circumference of a pencil. It might need two stitches."

Mulder sighed. "Then why the large-- Okay. Do you know I didn't even feel anything puncture my face?"

"What happened to you? You didn't say much during your call. You didn't even tell me what hospital you'd end up in."

"I didn't know then. I called you right after I called the ambulance. Last time, they wouldn't let me use my cell in the ambulance and especially not when we reached the emergency room."

"I called all the hospitals in the area looking for you, but no one would tell me anything. I had to sweep emergency rooms hospital by hospital. This was the second one, by the way." Her fingers tapped an angry pattern on her sleeve. "So what happened?"

There'd be no way she'd like any of this. Mulder decided to just get it out of the way. "They knocked a pile of full shipping crates on me. I don't remember what I did, but I must have knocked some of them away with my arms; the bruising suggests that. A few did fall on me though."

"You're lucky they didn't come back to make sure they'd killed you."

"That's usually enough to kill people."

Her mouth quirked. "But not Super Mulder?"

"I may not do that stronger, faster, more powerful, able-to-leap thing, but I can survive a pounding that would kill lesser mortals. And no, I didn't find what I was looking for; they moved the ship before I got there."

"Why did you ditch me?"

//Here it comes.// "I didn't--"

"If I'd been there, you probably wouldn't be here right now."

"Or we both have been under the crates."

Her expression said, "I don't think so."

He tried not to let it bother him that she obviously considered herself far more competent than he was. "I had good reasons."

"I don't need you to protect me."

"Truthfully--"

"I do hope so."

"I'll ignore that." Maybe it was the anger; maybe it was the pain, but the next words just slipped out. "I do try to protect you, like I wish someone had protected me."

"Mulder?"

He decided to go with it. "I can't avoid the truth now, not when I know it exists. But if I hadn't been forced to see what I've seen... Sometimes I wish I could live in the same rational, knowable world you do. Lacking that, I'd rather be the one to see these things and get hurt by them. I think everyone deserves to be protected."

"That's not good enough. While I have you here, I'm getting a real answer out of you."

"That was a real answer."

"I'm your partner, Mulder, not some china doll you have to coddle. Ditching me and leaving me in the dark show a lack of respect for my intelligence and abilities."

Mulder tried to marshal his thoughts to make sure he didn't say something she'd hate him for, but he couldn't help feeling a surge of resentment. The fog of painkillers and lingering pain didn't help... "I just figure you wouldn't be interested in going most of the time."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"When you're around, you're constantly telling me you don't believe any of my theories and that the trip is a waste of time."

"I'm making sure you're not letting your enthusiasms get the better of you."

"But sometimes things move too fast to be able to take the time to examine them from every single angle. Sometimes you have to work on instinct or risk losing it all. You did that on the Kevin Kryder case, and it was the right thing. If you hadn't, he would have been killed, and no one would have ever found the body."

"That was--"

"Instinct, and a good one. You could have taken the time to try to explain your reasoning to me and get me to agree, but if you had, it would have been too late."

"It's not the same thing at all!"

"Why not?"

"I don't do that all the time. And I did tell you where I was going."

"I-- just feel that if I made sure you agreed on every lead I wanted to follow, I wouldn't be investigating any of them at all."

"Is that such a bad thing?"

For a moment, Mulder couldn't breathe. That question ripped away everything. "Sometimes I feel like you think I'm an idiot for the things I think and do."

"You have a neck brace on. You could have been killed. It _was_ a stupid thing to do."

Mulder couldn't tell if he felt rage or despair. It teetered from one side to the next from second to second. He told myself that she was just upset that he'd ditched her and injured himself again, but--

He remembered why he never confessed anything to her or anyone if he could avoid it.

Finding out that that he'd been so completely deluded put everything in doubt...

"I'm trying to protect you too, Mulder."

"From myself?" His voice sounded like a shadow of itself, weightless.

Her face backed out of his line of sight, leaving him staring at the ceiling again. "Let me see if I can drag a doctor in here," she said. "This is negligence." Then she stalked off to make the staff's lives hell.

Mulder felt completely alone.

### End


End file.
